Self Knowledge and the Christ Experience

On-line since: 23rd June, 1992

A Lecture By
Rudolf Steiner
Dornach, February 2, 1923
GA 221

This is the 1st of 9 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at
Dornach, in February of 1923.
The title of the series of lectures is:
Earthly Knowledge and Heavenly Wisdom.
It was published in German as:
Erdenwissen und Himmelserkenntnis.

This translation is based on shorthand notes not revised by
the lecturer. It was translated by Mona Bradley, edited by
Dr. A. J. Welburn.
It is presented here with the kind permission of the Rudolf
Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland.
From GA# 221.

Thanks to an anonymous donor, this lecture has been made available to everyone.

SELF
KNOWLEDGE AND THE CHRISTEXPERIENCE

A
lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in Dornach, 2 February 1923

My dear Friends,

Suppose that we observe an animal during the course of a year. We will find
that its life follows the cycle of the seasons. Take for example an insect:
according to the time of year it will form a chrysalis (pupate), at another
season it will emerge and shed its chrysalis-form, at another time lay its
eggs, and so on. We can follow the course of nature, follow the stages of
such an insect's life, and find a certain connection between them, for the
animal organizes its life according to its natural surroundings.

If we then go on to consider people — say, the people of one of the
larger human communities during earlier stages of the earth's evolution
— we find that they too experienced, more or less instinctively, the
Life of nature. But as humanity developed further, those instincts, which
enabled people to experience their natural surroundings so directly, largely
died out. Among more advanced humanity, therefore, we will not find that
spontaneous harmony — a harmony between what arises from the human side
and the immediate setting or natural surroundings. That has to do with the
fact that humanity itself is undergoing a development, which constitutes its
history, and which will form a whole within the long planetary development
of the earth.

Returning to our example of a lower animal, in insect, where these matters
are revealed most clearly, we find that its experience spans a comparatively
short space of time — a year. Then the cycle repeats itself.
With regard to mankind, a certain law of development is found to run like a
thread through long ages of our earth's planetary evolution, as we have
repeatedly observed during our historical studies. We have become familiar,
for instance, with the type of instinctive clairvoyance belonging to
earlier peoples. Their pictorial consciousness gradually diminished during
an intermediate period of human development, eventually giving place to
modern consciousness which is intellectual, conceptual. Our own historical
time, dating from the first third of the fifteenth century, is the time of
the developing Consciousness Soul. It is that time when man will step fully
into his capacity of intellectual thinking in its narrower sense, which
will then bring him fully to free consciousness of the Self.

If we consider a longer space of time from this point of view, we begin to
find certain observable laws in the development of humanity. We can compare
these developmental laws with those which, say, an insect experiences
during the course of a year. Now in ancient times people still
instinctively lived together with their natural surroundings and with the
cycle of nature but these instincts have more or less died away, and
nowadays we live in a time in which conscious inner life must replace them.
What would happen nowadays if a man were to give himself up entirely to
chance! Suppose he were not to adopt any inner guiding principles or rules,
or that he did not tell himself at a certain moment: ‘This is how you
should orientate yourself’ — suppose that he were not to arrive at
any such inner orientation but lived his life though, from birth to death,
as chance directed. Man who by virtue of his higher soul development is
ranged above the animals would sink because of the manner in which he
handled his soul-life, below the animal level.

We may say, therefore, that the insect has a certain direction in its life
through spring, summer, autumn and winter. It does not give its development
up to chance, placing itself as it does within certain laws in each
succeeding phase of its life. Mankind, however, has left behind the age of
instinctive co-existence with nature. In his case it was more ensouled than
that of the animals, but still instinctive. His life has taken on a newer,
more conscious form. Yet we find that man, in spite of his higher soul-life
and capacity to think, has given himself over to a more chaotic life. With
the dying away of his instincts he has fallen, in a certain way, below the
level of the animals. However much one may emphasize man's further steps
forward, towering above the animals, one must still concede that he has
lost a particular inner direction in his life. This directing quality of
his life could be found once more by seeing himself as a member of the
human race, of this or that century. And just as, for a lower form of life,
the month of September takes its place in the course of the year, so does
this or that century take its place in the whole development of our planet.
And man needs to be conscious of how his own soul-life should he placed
historically in a particular epoch.

This is an idea to which man needs to grow accustomed so as to step even
further into the development of the Consciousness Soul. A man should be
able to say to himself: ‘I live in this or that epoch. I am not man
in the full sense of the word if I give myself over to chance. Chance has
deposited me into earthly life through birth. But to give myself up to
change as far as my consciousness is concerned would be simply to abandon
myself to karma. I am only man, in the full sense of being man, if I take
account of what the historical development of humanity asks from my
soul-life, belonging as I do to this particular epoch.’ An animal lives
within the cycle of the year: man must learn to live as part of the earth's
history.

We have placed as the most vital event in the earth's history the Mystery
of Golgotha. And we have often considered what it meant to live before the
Mystery of Golgotha, or at some point after it. We have here a kind of
fulcrum in historical development, from which vital, historical deed one
can reckon backwards and forwards. But to do justice to such reckoning we
must keep in mind the particular tasks awaiting the human soul in each
historical age. The kind of presentation of the past which is customary
cannot lead to such an understanding of each particular age. We may be told
in bald terms, how Persian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek or Roman history
unfolded, but that leaves us without any key to the position of each in the
whole regular historical development of our planet — in the whole regular
way an animal stands within the course of the year. Now, in order to gain a
concept of what we need to arouse in our own soul-life in this age, we have
had to consider the various ages of history from many points of view. Life
is rich and diverse, and if one wants to reach some reality concerning our
life on earth, we shall have to look at human life from ever-differing
points of view, from which the particular tenor of soul-life in our own
time.

If we look back to ancient times in human history we shall find, scattered
about the inhabited earth, what are know as the Mysteries. We find that
various groups of people, living their lives scattered about the earth,
develop under the influence of the Mysteries. They do so outwardly — but
more particularly in regard to culture and the life of the soul. We find
that individuals are accepted into the Mysteries, according to their degree
of maturity. There they undergo further development, which is to lead them
to a particular grade of knowledge, of feeling, and willing. Then, when they
have advanced in knowledge, in higher feeling, and higher willing, they
step out again and move among the majority of mankind, giving guidance for
the details of daily life, for the strengthening of the soul's inner work
and of their will, their actual deeds. With regard to past ages of man, the
best place in which to study such guidelines is actually the training of
those preparing for initiation in the Mysteries.

Though not of course in the abstract, intellectual manner of today, the
pupils in the Mysteries were led to know the world about them. Most
importantly, they learned to know the so-called three kingdoms of nature
and all that lives in them. In the lowest classes of our schools we learn,
by way of all sorts of concepts and pictures, how we stand within the three
realms of nature. Through concepts and ideas we learn to know mineral,
plant and animal. We then seek there the key to understanding human life
itself. Such concepts, with the intellectual soul-content imparted to
people these days, did not exist among those working for initiation in the
ancient Mysteries. Concepts did exist then; but they were not won, as
today, through the exercise of observation and logic. Rather, people had to
exercise their souls inwardly, so as to arrive eventually at inner pictures
of mineral, of plant, and animal. These people did not absorb the abstract
concepts of today but experienced pictures — pictures that intellectual
modern man might find fantastic but, nevertheless, pictures. And man knew
from direct experience that what he discovered, when he experienced these
pictures, actually yielded him something that lived in the mineral, plant
or animal — of what grew there, took form, and unfolded within them. This
he knew: and he knew it from those pictures which to modern man would
appear fantastic myths.

Ancient man knew that reality expressed itself in things which today are
considered mere mythology. He could certainly say: ‘The animal before me
has firm visible outlines.’ But these firm outlines were not what he
tried to grasp or understand. He tried rather to follow the flowing, mobile,
fluid quality of its life. He could not do this, however, in sharp
outlines, in sharply defined concepts. He had to teach in pictures that
were fluid, metamorphosing, changing. And thus it was taught in the
Mysteries.

But when, on the basis of this Mystery-knowledge, a man was to rise to
self-knowledge, he underwent a significant crisis in his soul. According to
the type of knowledge available in those ancient times, early man obtained
pictures of mineral, plant and animal. With his dreamlike consciousness, he
could then see, as it were, into the inner realms of nature. From the
content of the Mysteries he also received the guiding principles of
self-knowledge, much as he did in later times. ‘Know Thyself’
has been an ideal in all civilizations, in all ages of human cultural
development. But in progressing from his kind of imaginative, natural
knowledge towards knowledge of himself, ancient man underwent an inner crisis
of the soul. I can only describe the nature of the crisis by saying that when
he learned to look at the nature of the mineral as it was spread before him
man found fulfillment in his soul-life. He bore in himself the effects of
physical-mineral processes. He bore in himself pictures of interweaving
vegetative life, and also of animal life. In his world he was able to bring
all these together: mineral, plant and animal. Looking back from the
vantage point of the world around him into his own inwardness, he had, in
his primitive type of memory, an inner picture of mineral, plant and
animal, and of how they worked together.

Undertaking to obey the injunction ‘Know Thyself’, however, he found
himself suddenly at a stand. He had a world of inner pictures, varied,
richly diverse in form and colour, and sounding with inner music — this
was his experience of his earthly surroundings. Yet he felt that this world
of forms, diversity, and constant flux, this world that trembled with
glowing colour and radiance and musical tones, let him down when he made
the attempt to know himself. The pictorial way in which he tried to grasp
the nature of man itself baffled him in his attempt. He was able to attain
pictures of man too: but even while experiencing them he knew that the
reality of man's being, the source of his human dignity, escaped him — it
was not there.

In his Mystery-initiation man lived through this crisis. Yet out of it,
arising from the impotence of self-knowledge, something else developed: a
particular conviction about Life, a conviction on which every ancient
civilization was based. It meant that really enlightened people in those
ancient times could say: ‘Man does not reveal his true nature here on
earth. The minerals, plants and animals all achieve their end here on
earth; they can reveal themselves fully in the pictures which I have of
them.’ This is at the root of all ancient civilizations: this living
conviction that man does not belong to the earth in the same sense as do
the other realms of nature. His home is elsewhere than on the earth. His
home lies essentially in the super-sensible world. And this belief was no
arbitrary figment. It was achieved through a crisis of the soul — after
gaining the knowledge available at that time about the world external to
man. And a solution to the crisis was only possible because people still
had the capacity to turn their minds to life before birth, and from there
to life after death. Everyone then knew instinctively of life before birth.
It was part of earthly life, like a pre-natal memory. And they learned
about life after death on the basis of life before birth
(see Note 1).

On the basis of those capacities which he then had, man learned that after
crossing the threshold of death the moment would come when he would not
only have around him the natural world, external to man, but his own being
would arise before his soul. For it was characteristic of the more ancient
stages of human development that, between birth and death, man developed an
exclusively pictorial consciousness. I have often spoken about this. He did
not yet possess the intellectual consciousness which we have today. In
those days this was only developed immediately after death. And people
retained it then, after death. It is a peculiarity of man's progress that,
in ancient times, man's consciousness after death was an intellectual one;
whereas we experience a purely pictorial panorama of our life during the
three days after death. There lies the peculiarity, that in ancient times
men had a dreamy pictorial consciousness on earth, whereas nowadays we have
an intellectual consciousness. Then after death, they grew into an
intellectual consciousness which enabled them, once free of the body, to
gain freedom. In ancient times man became an intellectual and free being
after death.

On being initiated into this fact, the pupil in the Mysteries would be told
that he could win knowledge of the world external to man through his
picture-consciousness. If however he obeys the imperative ‘Know
Thyself’, and looks back upon himself, he will not find his full human
dignity there. He will not find it in earthly life before death. He will only
become fully human when he has crossed the threshold of death, and pure
thinking becomes his; for with pure thinking he can become a free being. It
is a strange thing that this type of consciousness occurred after death in
past ages of human development, whereas today after death we have the
panorama of past life spread out before us. In a sense this consciousness
has entered man's life in a counter-stream. It has moved from the life
after death into his actual earthly life. And what we have gained,
particularly since the first third of the fifteenth century, has trickled
into earthly man from post-earthly man. The pupil in the ancient Mysteries
knew clearly that the essence of man could only be found in super earthly
life, after death. This has now taken its place in life on earth. A real
super-sensible stream has entered into our life on earth. This sets up an
opposition to the direction of our human life, moving from ‘before’
to ‘after’, the super-sensible stream moving from ‘after’
to ‘before’. Thus, as modern people, we take part in super-earthly
life. We have undertaken to become worthy — worthy of what has been
drawn from super-sensible into sensible existence. We now have to win our
freedom by inner right. We must recognize fully the import of the
super-sensible for the development of the Consciousness Soul.

For the people of ancient times, when the injunction ‘Know Thyself’
loomed before them, their response had to be that there is no self-knowledge
on earth: for the essence of humanity is simply not fulfilled here on earth.
Man reaches it only when he has gone through the threshold of death into
the super-sensible world.

At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and for centuries afterwards, man
as he lived on earth was still called, in the language of ancient Mystery
wisdom, the ‘natural man’. And it was considered that this natural
man was not the real human being. The natural man was clearly differentiated
from the spiritual being which bore the essence of man. The view then was that
one only became spiritual man with the laying aside of the physical body.
Only after crossing the threshold of death did one become spiritual man
and, as such, ‘fully human.’ Initiation in the ancient Mysteries
led to great humility with regard to earthly consciousness. Earthly man could
not be made arrogant through Mystery-initiation. For whilst on earth he did
not even feel that he was man in the fullest sense. He felt that he was more a
candidate for humanity, and that he needed to use his life on earth in such
a way that, after death, he could become fully man. So, according to
Mystery-wisdom, man, as he went about his business on earth, was not a
revelation of full humanity.

Now we must come to ancient Greece, and the time when Greek culture was
widely influential. For it was then that people began to be aware, with
their intellect and in freedom, that the true being of man was pouring from
the sphere of after-death into man's earthly being. In Greek civilization
the individual on earth was not regarded as entirely fulfilling his
humanity. Men saw the work of the super-earthly, as it was drawing into the
earthly. They saw in the detail of man's physiognomy, his way of going
about, his shape — in all this they beheld with reverence, the
super-earthly streaming into the earthly.

With the recent development of humanity all that has changed. Now man says:
My great task is to become aware of my humanity. My task on this earth is to
reveal, at least to some degree, man's being in its fullness. I too stand
under the banner of the exhortation ‘Know Thyself’. I can compose
my soul for freedom, because I have gained intellectual consciousness. I can
lay hold of the inner strength of pure thinking in the act of self-knowledge.
Before the eye of my soul man can appear. Not that man should grow proud in
the partial fulfillment of this injunction ‘Know Thyself’. He should
realize how at every moment this freedom of his has to be wrestled for. He
should realize how, in his passions, emotions, feelings and sensibilities, he
is always dependent on the subhuman. What was seen by that high form of
pictorial consciousness in the world around, by ancient humanity, was also
this realm of subhuman. They recognized that all their knowledge was of the
subhuman realm in those ancient times. That was a significant point. For,
they said, true man does not exist on earth. To grasp the intellectual
nature of man they would have needed intellectual capacities themselves.
With their non-intellectual form of knowledge they could only grasp the
subhuman.

I have described in my
(Philosophy of Freedom)
how the intellectual is
further developed into conscious, exact clairvoyance. It then lives in a
free inner constitution of the soul. Only then can man know himself and his
relation to the other parts of his being, outside his pure thinking and his
free will. Through such a higher consciousness — imaginative, inspired
and intuitive consciousness — man may reach in self-knowledge beyond his
intellect and know himself as part of the super-sensible world. And then it
will be clear to him that although he is fully human, as has become clear
to him in his self-knowledge, full humanity requires of him that he perfect
it ever more and more.

Thus modern man cannot develop the same sort of humility that he needed in
ancient times, which arose when he had to say of himself: ‘Living in a
physical body you are not yet fully human, you are only a candidate for
humanity, not yet fulfilling your human dignity and worth. All you can do
is prepare yourself for consciousness and freedom as they will arise in you
immediately after death.’ A more modern man, who has meanwhile lived
under Greek conditions in a different incarnation, would say: ‘Take heed
that in your fleshly body between birth and death you do not neglect to be
fully man. For as a modern man your inner task is the working-out of what has
entered earthly life from the realm of the pre-earthly. You can become man
on earth, and you must therefore take upon yourself the difficulty of
becoming man on earth.’

All this is expressed in the development of man's religious consciousness.
On a previous occasion we saw how in earlier times man looked up
principally to the Father God, and in Christ he had the Son of God. In God
the Father he saw the creative source of substance and the super-sensible
origin of divine providence. Of this the earthly, perceptible world is
merely an impress. He looked up to the cosmos from the earth; and in
religious consciousness he looked up to God the Father. The pupils in the
Mysteries had always been conscious that the most they could learn about
man would be a preparation for the life after death. Now, through the
Mystery of Golgotha, the Son of God has united with the earth's life, and
man is able to develop an awareness of what St. Paul meant when he said
‘Not I, but Christ in me’. Now man can so direct his inner life as
to let the Christ-impulse come to flower in him; he can let Christ's life
flow and breathe through him. He can absorb the stream which has come to us
from pre-earthly life and bring it to fruition in his life on earth.

A first stage in the reception of this stream consists in man noticing that
at a particular point in his life he feels something flowering and coming
alive in him. Previously it sat under the threshold of his consciousness,
and he notices for the first time that it is there. It rises, filling him
with inner light, inner warmth, and he knows that this inner life, inner
warmth, inner light, has arisen in him during life on earth. He acquires a
greater knowledge of life on earth than was his birthright. He learns to
know something which arises within his humanity during his life on earth.
And if man is sensible of the light and Life, of the love arising in him,
and feels there the flowing, living presence of the Christ, he will receive
strength — strength to grasp the fully human, the post-earthly, in the
free activity of his own soul. Thus the Mystery of Golgotha and the
Christ-impulse are intimately bound up with the attainment of human
freedom, of that consciousness which is able to suffuse with inner life
and warmth our mere thinking that is otherwise dead and abstract.

The exhortation ‘Know Thyself — bring your humanity to fruition
in your own inner life’ has been addressed to humanity through all
time, and is still in force today. But the experience of Christ in man is
essential to our own day. It takes its place alongside the injunction
‘Know Thyself’, and must be given its full weight.

This indicates once again the enormous difference between the
soul-constitution of the present day and that which prevailed in times
past. We learn to consider man over great periods of time. The whole
process is compatible with what takes place when the insect is sensitive to
the period of summer in the setting of this world. For man should be able
to live in the whole history of the earth as an animal lives in the course
of the year. The insect ensures that it notices the transition to autumn,
and it sets in motion another aspect of its life accordingly, as it did for
spring and summer. And man knows: Once upon a time we were instinctively
clairvoyant; we were unfree; our consciousness was pictorial; we were
unable to obey the injunction ‘Know Thyself’; we know we could fully
realize our humanity only on the other side of the gate of death; that time
was analogous to spring in the life of the insect. Then came the Greek era,
as summer and autumn come round for the insect. This was a bridge to that
later era in which we now live. Our soul's work is different. We should be
able to know ourselves to a certain degree here on earth, and accordingly
be free after death to reach higher stages of development than in previous
ages of man. Then one was wholly man only after death. In those ancient
times man's task on the earth was to be a candidate for life, becoming
fully man after death. In this, our own age, it is man's task to realize
himself here in earth, that after death he may rise to higher stages of
development than he could in former ages.

In those times the danger was that if he did not live his life on earth
properly, man would not arrive at his full humanity. Today we face
something different. We have to achieve our full humanity while on earth.
If we fail in this, we betray ourselves and in the life after death plunge
further down into the subhuman. In ancient days things could be left
undone; today destruction follows. Then, not to become a candidate for life
was an omission; today a man destroys, through his own humanity, something
in the whole human race if he does not strive after full humanity in his
own life. In past ages he merely left something undone; by doing so today
he betrays mankind.

Thus we must grasp the need to place ourselves consciously in the world on
a higher Level of being, as the insect does instinctively, on a lower
Level, in its world. Otherwise man delivers himself up to chaos, which the
animal instinctively does not do. We must learn through Anthroposophy to be
really human, that we may not experience the scandal of being less in the
world-order than the animals — despite the Gods having determined us for
higher things. The animals do not neglect their part in the cosmic harmony,
yet we as mankind turn the cosmic harmony into dissonance. And thus, I may
say, we shall heap upon ourselves cosmic scandal, if we do not learn to
think in this way and make our consciousness accord with the demands of the
age. This we must learn in these days to join our feeling to our
intellectual life. We must take in what would follow upon our not striving
after that knowledge which makes us fully man. It would be a scandal before
the Gods themselves.